Hello, welcome to the Mars Exploration Rover Flight Director report for June 25th 2004. My name is George Chen, I’m Flight Director for MER-A Spirit.

We’re in the middle of sol 170 now on MER-A Spirit and we’re just finishing up some Instrument Deployment Device, that’s the arm on the rover, some IDD work on a rock known as ‘Pot of Gold’. On sol 169, yesterday, we applied the Rock Abrasion Tool, the so-called RAT, onto the rock, to try to grind underneath the top layer of the rock. And we encounter a lot of warning messages from the rover. We’re not quite sure exactly what the cause of that is, but there is some speculation that the Rock Abrasion Tool instead of polishing off the top layer, may have knocked off a big chunk of the rock. So we’re still looking at that right now.Today sol 170 we are using the arm to bring the Microscopic Imager down and take some pictures of the rock that we attempted to grind and then we’ll put the Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer and the Mossbauer spectrometer down to determine the composition of the rock.

On the other side of the planet it is sol 150, we’re finishing sol 150 on MER-B Opportunity. And we have been spending some time at a rock known as ‘Virginia’, specificly at a location on ‘Virginia’ known as ‘London’. So we’ve been grinding a RAT hole, this is the third RAT hole we’ve ground on this general location and we’re doing some Mossbauer spectrometer integration of that rock so we’ll know the elemental composition of that rock.

And that’s what’s happening on Mars today.

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